Three students, and we're peer reviewing their papers. The last one we do, I haven't read before because the student handed it in late and I'm trying to stick to my draconian no-feedback-for-late-papers policy.
It's a major paper about men's magazines. Even with a distracted glance at the first paragraph, it's instantly obvious that it's at least partially plagiarized. Still, I give the student the benefit of the doubt and, chipper, ask him to paraphrase his own claim. Nothing. One of the peer reviewers, who has understood his paper better than he has, explains it.
The paper isn't taken wholesale from a single source, clearly, so I have no idea of the extent of the problem . . . maybe he just called in the cavalry for a couple of sentences in the intro and the rest is okay. So I continue the conference. The peer reviewers keep commenting on how difficult and academic the language is. The plagiarizer has frozen up like he knows judgment is upon him. By now, I think it's obvious to everyone what's going on.
So awkward! I didn't want to confront the cheater with the other students there, but also didn't want to ignore the obvious. I think it went okay, though. I cut the conference short on a different pretext, asked the cheater to stay while the other students were there so they knew I was going to deal with it, and then gently prodded until the student confessed. I knew what to do, having had a different plagiarizer to confront last week, which didn't go so well. WTF, students???
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